As a follow up to yesterday’s post about WordPress permalink structure (where a good discussion took place in the comments), I decided today that I would dedicate a post to showing you how to switch your blog’s permalink structure without creating any invalid URL’s.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to grab the Permalink Redirect plugin (my plugin review here) and activate it.  Once activated, when you go into the Settings panel you should find a new tab called Permalink Redirect. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you should see this:

In the old permalink structures box, you can paste your current permalink structure there (depending on which you choose, something like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/).  If you are unsure what exactly to type, please refer to the permalink page on the WordPress Codex.

Now save and go to the Permalinks tab.   Select the custom field and type /%postname%/, then save.

Now go to an old URL and it should automatically redirect you to the same post’s new URL.   The search engines will see the 301 redirect and update accordingly!

Any questions?  Feel free to comment below!

Update: I believe the plugin has changed since this was written.  If you are comfortable updating your .htaccess file, you can instead redirect all your links to the new /%postname%/ url by adding the following:

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4

One of the great things about using WordPress is the built-in SEO advantages that this software gives you over building static pages or other blogging software. You have an advantage from the start over others not using WordPress! With that said, there are a lot of SEO techniques that need to be set up or applied by the user. The permalink structure is one of these that you can easily set up when creating your blog and then forget about it.

By default, your WordPress Dashboard gives you a 3 choices to choose from. The default permalink structure is a terrible option from an SEO standpoint and the other two aren’t bad, but they aren’t your best option. According to Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007 (Matt is the lead guy for the Google Search team), the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens. According to Matt:

• Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain.
• Name your directory “blog” instead of “WordPress”.
• In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.
• Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it is good SEO.
• Include keywords naturally in your posts.
• Make your post dates easy to find.
• Check your blog on a cell phone and/or iPhone.
• Use partial-text feeds if you want more page views; use full-text feeds if you want more loyal readers.
• Blogs should do standard pings.
• Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www).
• Use a permanent redirect (301) when moving to a new host.
• Don’t include the post date in your URL.

For WordPress users, this is easy to set up. Go into your blog’s Options panel and click on the Permalinks tab. You should see the following:

Click the custom radio button and type /%postname%/ into the field. This is the most ideal setup for your WordPress blog.

If you already have an established blog using another structure, you can easily use the Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin to redirect your posts to the new structure.

When it comes to search engine optimization, most everything is speculation and theories, but there are a few things that we know for sure.  One of the things that Matt Cutts, who works for Google’s search team, has confirmed is how to best optimize your blog’s permalink structure for Google’s search engine. 

In a statement he made at WordCamp 2007, Matt made two points that apply to permalink structure:

1. In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.
2. Do not include the post date in your URL.

As you can see, for WordPress users, your best bet is to use /%postname%/ as your custom permalink structure.  This way the search engines can properly recognize your keywords and it avoids using the month/day/year or category in your post.   

If you already have an established blog and permalink structure, but want to make the switch, you can make the switch then use a 301 redirect to point to your older posts to avoid broken links.  For more information on how to switch your permalink structure within WordPress, you can check out my post titled How to: Update Your Post’s Permalink Structure in WordPress.